I generally skip Jeff Jacoby's column in the Globe, but this rant about "car-haters and PC nannies" caught my eye yesterday. I'm surprised he left out Al Qaeda, since it's common knowledge that all bicyclists belong to the terrorist organization. Anyway, I just had to pass it on to anyone who missed it:

"Traffic congestion is choking our cities, hurting our economy, and reducing our quality of life," begins a new report from the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank. Rush-hour gridlock paralyzes 39,500 lane-miles of roadway each year, eating up $63 billion in lost time and fuel. But much worse is to come.

By 2030, the number of severely congested lane-miles will reach nearly 60,000 per year, an increase of more than 50 percent. Commuters in the largest metropolitan areas will spend 65 percent more time in traffic than they do now . Within 25 years, at least a dozen major cities will be choked with travel delays worse than in today's Los Angeles, whose notorious congestion is the worst in America.

The solution is the obvious one: Build more highways, and manage them more intelligently. "The old canard 'we can't build our way out of congestion' is not true," the authors write.

They estimate that 104,000 new lane-miles will be needed by 2030, at a cost of about $21 billion a year, much of which could be raised through electronic tolling. The return on that investment would be a stunning 7.7 billion fewer hours spent in traffic each year, along with all the wealth and freedom those time savings would generate.

All this is heresy, of course, to the car-haters and PC nannies who are forever lecturing us to quit driving and use mass transit. But we are overwhelmingly a nation of drivers; the real "mass transit" is the traffic on our highways. If the highways don't grow to keep up with that traffic, the strangulating misery of gridlock will only get worse.

I am convinced that Jacoby, like his shiksa counterpart Ann Coulter, is actually a radical leftwinger, mercilessly parodying the unyielding idiocy of the right week after week in his column. I mean, he can't be for real.

Everything Jeff Jacoby writes in the Globe turns into a discourse on some vast conspiracy or other. Last week it was the “diversity dogmatists,” the week before “PC police,” and on and on it goes.

I loved his I’m-rubber-you’re-glue “chicken hawk” piece a couple weeks ago. Someone called him a “chicken hawk,” and after whinging and whining about it for the length of the column he concludes: “Those who cackle ‘Chicken hawk!’ are not making an argument. They are merely trying to stifle one, and deserve to be ignored.” Stifle the stiflers! Good one, Jeff! It was utterly solipsistic, brilliantly sophomoric, and typical of his deliciously warped sensibilities.

This is what makes him amusing at first but tedious after you read about three of his columns. They all have basically the same ending.

Now, sometimes the finger-pointing is slightly warranted, but in the “car-haters” column in question the idea that people promoting mass transit are “car haters” first – that their motives spring entirely from some irrational hatred of cars – is just plain stupid. And the idea that encouraging mass transit, believing in it enough to fund it properly and put competent people in charge of it, is some kind of car-hating conspiracy rather than just forward-thinking good sense, is balderdash, plain and simple. Mass transit works in other places, it can work here. At some point the petroleum’s gonna run out anyway. You might want to start planning for it now.

But back to Jacoby’s modus operandi: calling people “haters,” whether car-haters or Bush-haters, is an effort to discredit their valid arguments (to stifle them, in other words) when you have none to counter with yourself.